Why I can't stop thinking about Trump's flying-drug-bag quip

President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump board Air Force One prior to departure from Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, July 12, 2017, as they travel to Paris, France, for Bastille Day. (Saul Loeb / AFP/Getty Images)

I should let it go, I know.

President Donald Trump has said dozens, if not scores, of strange things since July 12, but I keep thinking about what he told reporters that night about his proposed border wall with Mexico during a group interview on Air Force One.

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"One of the things with the wall is you need transparency," he said, according to an official White House transcript. "You have to be able to see through it. In other words, if you can't see through that wall — so it could be a steel wall with openings, but you have to have openings because you have to see what's on the other side of the wall.

"And I'll give you an example," Trump went on. "As horrible as it sounds, when they throw the large sacks of drugs over, and if you have people on the other side of the wall, you don't see them — they hit you on the head with 60 pounds of stuff. It's over. As crazy as that sounds, you need transparency through that wall."

Crazy is one word for it.

No, not the idea of having window-like openings in a security barrier. That makes sense.

But the idea of ultra-strong smugglers blindly flinging large bags of illegal drugs over the border and conking people on the head. That's nutty. Daft. Blithely detached from reality in a way that would be deeply disturbing in a village trustee, let alone the president of the United States.

Of all the clever ways smugglers have of getting drugs into the country, hurling sacks of them to waiting accomplices isn't one of them. The Washington Post reported that the world record for throwing a 56-pound weight over a bar is 19 feet 7 inches, right about the height of the barriers already protecting a third of the U.S.-Mexico border and well shy of the 50-foot height Trump has touted for his wall.

And even if the international catapulting of weighty contraband were common practice, the odds of an innocent bystander being struck would be minuscule.

Trump is not a man who deviously shades the truth. Trump is not a man who orchestrates big lies. In this wall ramble we see that Trump is simply a man who makes stuff up. Stuff that isn't right. Stuff that doesn't even sound right. But stuff that, in the moment, to his befogged brain, feels right and justifies his other improvisational notions of governance.

In a normal administration, sackgate would have launched a thousand think pieces and been Topic A for at least a week.

The president has gone goofy. What in God's name are we to do?

This, after all, is a nation that had a tizzy when President Barack Obama wore a tan suit to deliver a statement in 2014. A nation that still remembers that Obama once misspoke on the campaign trail and said he'd visited 57 states.

But Trump has so successfully redefined normal that the drug-sack story was a minor blip — not even mentioned in Chicago's major papers — quickly supplanted by tweets, asides, bluster and further folderol from the leader of the free world.

His interview one week later, on Wednesday, with the New York Times, for example, contained a slew of misrepresentations, distortions, threats and daffy improvisations more relevant than his cartoonish justification for making his wall transparent. Then came news reports that he's exploring the idea of preemptively issuing pardons to himself, family members and top associates.

"Another day of Trump," sighed a colleague, brushing me off when I began fulminating about it.

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Yet I also often find myself too numbed to be as outraged and concerned as this moment in history demands.

So maybe it's not that I can't let go of the image of Trump fantasizing about flying sacks of drugs; it's that I don't want to. Too much is at stake for us to get used to the sound of nonsense.

Keep a lid on the rhetoric, ladies and gentlemen!

Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner is "a profoundly inept and mean-spirited governor. I've lived in Chicago for 50 years. In that time Jim Thompson was governor, Jim Edgar, George Ryan. I disagreed with them sometimes, but I never thought they were unfit for their jobs or evil people. That's where I am with this governor, and it's profoundly disturbing."

No ma'am. He's a decent family man, a citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.

With a tip of the hat (and sincere best wishes) to ailing Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., from whom I cribbed that gracious response, I'll add this:

I criticize Rauner frequently. But even if I believed he has evil intentions and is fundamentally mean spirited — which, for the record, I don't — I'd never say so. Those kinds of personal attacks, which Preckwinkle delivered on a radio program airing Sunday aren't persuasive and don't advance the conversation.

Where does the debate go after you play the "evil" card?

And, for that matter, to Rauner, how do you expect fruitful negotiations with Democrats to proceed when you continually play the "corrupt" card and deride Democratic lawmakers as puppets?

Train your rhetoric on what your opponents do and say, not what you think is in their heart.

McCain was making a similar point in 2008 when, as the Republican presidential nominee running against Obama, he offered the "No ma'am ..." corrective to a woman at a campaign town-hall event who questioned Obama's nationality.

Yes, earlier in this column I emptied my thesaurus at President Trump. But — and I know it's a fine line —I aimed my pejoratives at his words, not his essence.

The winner of this week's reader poll is a recycled quip that's been knocking around online in various forms for at least 11 years and presented at least eight times as an original thought: "If I ever owned a funeral home, I would name it 'Remains To Be Seen.'"

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